


resurrection work for fun and profit

by potted_music



Series: resurrection for fun and profit [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-05-30 16:01:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged that an anatomy student in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a cadaver to dissect.(Set two years afterwin some, lose some.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm keeping Burke & Hare as historical figures, but replacing most everybody else with characters from the series/the novel. Also, I'm changing some things around for plot purposes.

For a man who must still have Hickey's come leaking out of his well-used arse, Goodsir sure knows how to keep a straight face. Hickey's had tricks like this, concerning themselves with his moral improvement even before their prick was safely tucked back into their breeches.

“Would you like to have your body handled thusly, when your time comes?” Goodsir asks, awkwardly turning the lid of a herring barrel in his hands, mindful of the rusty nails sticking out every which way.

Hickey leans in closer to the barrel and takes a deep sniff. The corpse rammed into the tight quarters smells, not unpleasantly, of herring brine. Indifferent to the finer points of propriety and the peculiarity of the situation, his stomach lets out a low rumble.

“Yeah, maybe that wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did. I almost left him at a fishmonger’s down at the Grassmarket. Now, that’d be a hoot. The barrels all look the same, see, and the weight’s about right too. Joked with the lasses not a day earlier, and now he’s as sensate as ten dozen herrings, and about as useful.”

Goodsir turns a delightful shade of scandalized red that makes Hickey press on. He’s getting careless, letting his gift of the gab get the better of him, but it’s not like any of them are going anywhere.

“I don’t know who’d have had less use for the wares, Mr. Goldner for the dead fart, or you for the herring. Well, I guess it could go into those lamb pies of mystery, in a pinch. Now that I’m thinking of it, these things sure are in more ample supply in December than any lamb I know.”

Hickey pokes the thing in the shoulder, carefully averting his eyes from the uncanny grimace of death on the corpse’s face.

“It’s finally going soft, thank Pete. Well, are you getting it out or not?”

With a resigned sigh, Goodsir pulls on a pair of protective sleeves and nimbly ties an apron over his square skirted coat—the finest broadcloth, worth more than Hickey’s lodgings for a month, most likely. Nevertheless, he seems in no haste to get down to work.

“Come on, help me, we’ll be done in no time,” he says, stepping closer. “For a man in your trade, you have a curious aversion to getting your hands dirty.”

Hickey’s not sure what game this is, but he sure as hell ain’t playing it. “No way in hell, this is my new camlet coat!”

“Yes, and a very fine one at that. How you have risen in life on the backs of your fallen comrades.”

When Goodsir throws him a pair of protective sleeves, he catches them on pure instinct, and then stares down at the offensive item in his hands.

“They are no comrades of mine,” he grumbles. “I have no intention of dying in a ditch, for one.”

“Chop-chop!” Goodsir says, impatiently tapping a foot on the floor.

“Is that what you say when you approach a cadaver with a hacksaw?”

Despite himself, Hickey feels a surge of inordinate pride when a hint of a smile tugs at the corners of Goodsir’s lips. It’s that smile that finally makes him relent and pull on the sleeves. If it matters so damn much to the tosser, let him have his small triumph.

Hickey grabs the body under the armpits and yanks it up while Goodsir hooks his arms under the man’s knees. If ever there was a finer production of the Descent from the Cross than their small show with a drunkard tramp for Jesus and two sodomites playing the parts of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus the Pharisee, Hickey’d be hard-pressed to imagine it. He dumps the sod on the table unceremoniously, while Goodsir lowers down the legs with considerably more care. He drags the sleeves off the moment Goodsir leans to roll the thing over onto its back, dropping them on the floor with a huff of only slightly exaggerated disgust. When Goodsir freezes, he instinctively steps closer to see what startled him so.

“It’s another one of these,” Goodsir says, his fingers hovering a mere fraction of an inch over five shallow gashes running down the corpse’s pale chest.

Now’s not the time to get fussy, Hickey thinks. If Goodsir wanted pristine bodies smelling of roses, he chose the wrong metier altogether. “They are not nearly deep enough to render him useless for dissection,” he says with a frown, and then sudden realization strikes him. “Not deep enough to burke him either, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“God, no!” Goodsir pinches the bridge of his nose with a much put-upon air, which is rich, given that it’s Hickey who’s become the subject of questioning. “Where did you get him?”

“If you insist on catechising me, I will take my business elsewhere,” he says, a joyful smile at sharp odds with the steel in his voice. “You think Dr. Stanley won’t pay for fresh supplies?”

“Not as generously, no.”

Hickey nods, grudgingly admitting the point. The word on the street is, Dr. Stanley lost many paying students after the Burke and Hare case, which made his school infamous, and now wouldn’t pay more than measly seven pounds, three for a small, for your trouble. Won’t be nice about it either.

Goodsir’s gaze is riveted on the corpse again, as if it were the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. Hickey’d beg to differ: there’s precious little of genuine interest about these things rendered useless in death. Hesitantly, Goodsir begins to speak.

“Bodies like this have been coming in for a while, and not only to us. I’ve asked students at other schools, and they saw it too. A rictus of horror on their faces, five shallow gashes, otherwise in good health, discounting the fact that they are all dead.”

“What’s it to you? You get the corpse, I get the money. Why muck up the good thing we have going?”

“There have been twelve so far, that I know of. Men who should, by all appearances, be alive, now dead, with this-” he gestures vaguely over the distorted face. “You might not have noticed, but I am in the trade of preventing unnecessary suffering.” _Unlike you_ hangs between them, unspoken but all the more striking for it.

Hickey grimaces. “What got into you, all of a sudden? You weren’t such a nag for two years, so why start now?”

“It’s just-” Goodsir pauses, swallowing whatever he initially wanted to say, then lets out a feeble laugh. “We’ve known each other for two years, and I don’t even know your Christian name.”

Hickey doesn’t quite understand how the nagging proceeds from this point, unless Goodsir intends to win his good graces by an ostentatious show of caring for his modest person. A lie comes easily to his lips.

“It’s William. Billy, to my friends” It’s not even that much of a lie, all told, given that it was Billy who brought them together.

“William,” Goodsir repeats with concentration, committing yet another falsehood to memory. “Hello, Billy-to-my-friends.” His face breaks into a shy smile that almost, but not quite makes Hickey regret lying. “Two years, and I don’t know the first thing about you. I don’t even know how to find you when the Anatomy Act passes, rendering your trade obsolete, and you no longer have reasons to come here.”

That doesn’t sound good. Truth be told, that sounds like the most rotten damned poxy betwaddled thing he’s heard all year. Making sure that his voice comes out even, Hickey asks, “Will it pass this time?”

“It seems likely, yes. We finally managed to sway Sir William Rae in our favour.”

“William who?” 

“The Lord Advocate for Scotland.”

Hickey swears through gritted teeth, and then swears some more for good measure. Whenever he pauses, feeling like he’s exhausted his store of anger, something else comes up, like a fish swimming up from the murky depths.

“The sodding Parliament,” he spits, “stands on our bones, and now you begrudge a poor bereaved man a couple of shillings to buy a jug of whisky to drown his sorrow in the time of grief?” Goodsir’s face is uncomprehending—a man contemplating a riddle in a language he doesn’t know—so Hickey explains, “The hill where the Parliament stands- it used to be a poor man’s graveyard, you know?”

Goodsir’s perplexed expression does not quite vanish when he says, “As a matter of fact, yes, I do. And how do _you_ know that?”

“What, if I’m not wearing one of those embroidered waistcoats, I’m stupid?”

“You just don’t seem like the bookish type.”

And that’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. The bastard doesn’t even have the courage to come right out and say, “You don’t seem the kind to know how to read,” or “You don’t seem the kind to know anything but the dirt you grew up and will return to, soon enough.” Hickey's past playing to the humanitarian impulses of a well-meaning prick who'll later write a treatise about his deep concern for the greatly lowered moral tone of the lower classes.

“Well, us types who have little use for books, we can count, y’know,” he says, letting his accent slip. “A family loses a breadwinner? We know they can sell the corpse and have some coins to tide them over. And, since you asked so nicely earlier, it won’t concern me overmuch if I ended up on the slab meself, I don’t think, and if some sod makes a few shillings off me, what’s it to me?”

He half expects a punch. Half wants one, to be honest: wants an excuse to punch back, get that baffled face bloodied, crush those ridiculous wire-rimmed glasses under his heel.

“I’m sorry,” Goodsir says instead, reaching as if to touch him, but thinking better of it, his hand frozen mid-gesture. “I’d rather it were not you the next time someone drags a tea chest here. I fear it’ll be you, nearly every time.”

“Aw,” Hickey coos, a pout turning into a bare-toothed scowl. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head destined for greater thoughts about the likes of me. We survive, that’s what we do.”

When Goodsir finally speaks again, it’s in a studied, careful voice that somehow hurts more than anger would. “Please, just ask around about this if you ever get the chance.” He folds his fingers into an approximation of claws.

Hickey yawns theatrically. "This is a bore. Well, I'd better get going. A cart around the Surgeons’s Square might draw unwelcome attention, and I’ve far outstayed my welcome. Unless you fancy another round?"

He doesn’t expect Goodsir to say yes, not right on the heels of their spat, so it comes as a pleasant surprise when he does. Goodsir is still tender and stretched from their previous knee-wobbler, slick with Hickey's seed. Hickey slides right in.

"Please take care of yourself," Goodsir says to his retreating back when they say their goodbyes afterwards. Hickey doesn’t glance back.

As to the cause of the deaths that had so mystified the do-good, Hickey doesn't need to ask around. He has seen the thing with his own two eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Harry knows it’s finally time to leave his post when he hears the front door open and close upstairs, signalling the arrival of the dissecting-room porter. He locks and bolts the cellar door with a yawn, and ascends the short flight of bare stone stairs separating the squalid cavernous space underground from the world of the living.

The biting night chill has not yet released its talony grip on Mr. Collins’s little room on the ground floor, but the dissecting-room porter is already crouched on the gaudy rug in front of the hearth, a matchbox in hand.

While Mr. Collins busies himself with the kindling, Harry unwraps a cut of good Dunlop cheese his brother brought him from Anstruther, and fishes out a pair of toasting forks secreted away on a shelf behind a half-completed osteology display and assorted anatomical diagrams. As they toast slices of heavy rye bread and rich creamy cheese over the small fire in companionable silence, Harry relaxes in the warmth, listening to the noise of the city waking up around them. He lets his mind, denied sleep over the course of his disreputable vigil, float in the buzz, neither dozing nor fully awake to his surroundings. Beyond the window, dawn paints tufts of cirrus clouds carnation pink and mauve against the vibrant blue shining through the dishwater grey canvas of the morning sky.

Polishing the last drips of melted cheese off his plate with a bread crust, Mr. Collins is the first to break the spell. “How was the night?”

Harry closes his eyes slowly, then opens them again, feeling the quiet of the morning, so early it’s little more than no man’s land between the day past and the day present, a time half-baked, unrealized, and not fully real, crumble to dust under the heel of his daily duties. “We have another one of our claw mark bodies, I’m afraid.”

Mr. Collins’s face falls, his skin turning ashen grey within the space of a second. “Did they tell you where they procured it?”

Harry instinctively reaches out to pat his shoulder in a gesture of feeble sympathy even he has to recognize as inadequate. “No, I’m afraid, although I do believe Cowgate is his customary stalking ground, which might make it our fourth body in the area.”

“The tentative fourth to be added to the three that we know of, against the eight we know nothing whatsoever about.”

“We’d better take another look at it then. Maybe we will notice something this time.” He pulls a watch out of his breast pocket. “It is well past the time we got to work on the body.”

Preparing cadavers for dissection is well beyond Harry’s role as a third-year student doubling as an assistant-demonstrator in class, but he’s long fallen into the habit of staying to watch the dissecting-room porter do the work whenever he has the night shift at the school. He knows the routine so well that he doesn’t need to open his eyes to imagine, by sound alone, Mr. Collins carefully gathering his equipment: the metal clatter of instruments jangled together on the bottom of the leather portmanteau, the finer jingle of bottles of solutions on top.

When they descend the stairs he went up not a full hour earlier, a slight shudder runs through Harry’s body. The chilling dank breath escaping from the cellar’s maw blends with the memory of searing touches, of the firm grip on his hips pinning him in place for the intrusion that left him boneless with pleasure and altogether helpless to say no. Gone are the days when he feared discovery with a breathless mixture of elation and shame, suspecting, having only explored those pastimes fumblingly and alone before Hickey, that everybody would see his acts writ across his face like an indelible brand. He no longer dreads that one look at him, one sniff at his sweat and other, earthier smells would betray what he’s been up to, and yet he still glances back guiltily at Mr. Collins over his shoulder, almost tripping on the bottom step.

Mr. Collins, the charitable soul that he is, ascribes his own worries to Harry, and misinterprets his uncharacteristic clumsiness altogether.

“The markings are definitely the same,” he says with one morose look at the body. “This does not sit right with me either. Yet again, we are covering murder.”

“The purveyors are different though. This is the first time this particular one brought a body with these wounds,” Harry hastens to clarify, remembering Hickey’s outrage at the hint of the suggestion of foul play. Billy’s, he corrects himself, and almost breaks into a smile that would be odds with the grisly topic of their conversation. “Unless they have all simultaneously discovered a nigh undetectable poison, the resurrectionists are not the ones behind the murders.”

“If we are not the ones ordering it, that doesn’t make these men any less dead, and we are still profiting from the tragedy,” Mr. Collins says, setting his instruments out in a neat row.

Harry leans and sniffs at the corpse’s lips again. It is fresh enough that whisky breath should have lingered, even in the absence of breath itself.

“No smell of alcohol this time either, so there goes your theory of poisoned drink,” he remarks as Mr. Collins picks up a small bone saw. “Unless the poison is indeed delivered through these gashes. What do you make of him?”

Mr. Collins gives a lopsided shrug, cutting right across one of the incisions.

“We had, among others, a known jail-bird, who might have had enemies, an Irish Traveller, whom nobody would have defended against a predator, and a local widow selling salt and camstane, whom everybody liked well enough. I hesitate to imagine where their paths might have crossed, never mind what might have brought them together in death.” The saw rasps against the breastbone, an unpleasant wet sound that Harry has failed to get used to so far, and suspects he never will. “The contents of his stomach might provide a clue.”

Harry perks up. “Who’s put down his name for the abdomen?” 

“Orren, I believe.” Mr. Collins sets the saw aside and wipes his hands on his apron before picking up the forceps, using the moment’s pause to check tomorrow’s warrant for dissection. “Wait, Orren subscribed for the lower extremities. It’s Des Voeux.”

Harry lets out an exasperated groan that’s only somewhat exaggerated. “I’ll have to watch him anyway. Last time he forgot to put a plaster over an inch-long scratch across his palm, can you imagine? It’s like he wants to die of necusia. Did you know they pumped pus by the pint out of poor Tom Hartnell, and still failed to save him?”

Mr. Collins lets out a noncommittal grunt. Harry watches him insert the forceps into a four-inch cut and force it open, providing a window onto the inner workings of humankind. Somewhere in there, between cartilage, connective tissue, veins and nerves, there’s a soul, or something that makes us love and hope, at any rate, he thinks with wonder. Mr. Collins interrupts his reverie by plunging the needle of his injecting-syringe into the beginning of the aorta, visible deep in the open ribcage. The viscous solution of vermillion and size courses through the arteries, bringing the body a fleeting semblance of life for one last time, but too hastily.

“Does the sleeping draft I mixed you help at all?” Harry asks cautiously, watching the veins in the corpse’s legs bulge. Mr. Collins, as a rule, is everybody’s favourite injector: his bodies set marvellously, preserving all veins, even the smaller ones in the fingers, in pristine condition; but not when his hands shake so.

Mr. Collins wipes his forehead with the back of his palm.

“These things are tough on me. Whenever I look at these poor souls, I remember her. Besides, Dr. Stanley stormed in yesterday.”

“You didn’t tell me. What did he say?”

Harry knows—through rumours that made the whole deal sound even less salubrious—that it has been seven years since Mr. Collins, then a dissecting-room porter at Dr. Stanley’s school, took a fancy to a girl of easy virtue; six years since he saw her brought in for dissection by Burke and Hare, and suspected foul play. He has not been the same since.

Mr. Collins stares blindly at his hands, the work-roughened hands of the man who was still unerringly gentle with his charges, despite them being well past appreciating his efforts. “The usual. That I betrayed him by publishing a pamphlet about him abetting murders, as long as he got the bodies. That we are stealing his suppliers.”

“Which we are, to be fair.”

“He deserved worse. He ordered her put in a glass jar, showing off the fine specimen he had bagged for him. The students sketched her naked, without shame. She was three months in whisky before they finally cut her up, putting an end to the sordid affair.”

With a shudder, Goodsir imagines, yet again, himself in that position: a box opening to reveal the features he knew in life (laughing, frowning a moment before the climax, raging against the world, always so mercurial, now struck still). The alternative is even worse though: that familiar body brought to some other school and cut up unceremoniously into eights, bones soon cleaned of flesh; him left to wonder for all eternity why Billy has stopped coming, unable to recognize the man he knew in life from an osteology display. At least the students wouldn’t flock to draw that body in suggestive poses.

There’s a pause as Mr. Collins starts to shave the man’s hair off, touching him with more care than the wretch probably knew in life. And then, without looking up from the shorn tufts, he says, “I cannot wait for the Anatomy Act to pass. Then, at least, we’ll know that no body would cross our threshold without a proper death certificate signed by a medical attendant. If we cannot do without this, we at least owe it to our conscience to do it properly.”

Harry hums under his breath, taking a closer look at the gashes. There’s no sign of a poisonous substance in the wounds, no clue that could help them unravel this gruesome mystery. Finally and much against his better judgment, he says, “A friend said that the Anatomy Act would deprive the poor of their livelihood. That many a family rely on this grisly income on losing their breadwinner, say.”

Mr. Collins nicks the skin over the dead man’s ear with his blade, and sets the razor aside. “Does this friend of yours bring us the bodies, by any chance?”

When Harry nods, Mr. Collins growls, “Not that rat-faced redhead again.” On noticing the deep blush creeping up Harry’s neck, his voice softens, and he adds, “His influence on you fills me with foreboding, Mr. Goodsir, if you don’t mind my saying so. You bring back the most outlandish ideas from your conversations.”

“He’s the only person to talk to me about the sides of life I had no reasons to consider before,” Harry says, truthfully enough. Even this admission fills him with a measure of shame. That this is not the whole truth, nobody needs to know. 

This time, Mr. Collins’ voice is much kinder. “Talk to the honest people then. Talk to the moral people. You don’t need to stoop to the lowest common denominator of humanity to understand how the common folk live, unless that, too, is a reflection of how you see us.”  
“Nothing could be farther-” Harry yelps, feeling the blush burn scarlet on his cheeks.

Mr. Collins ignores the interruption though. “You do know he’s not buying the corpses off grieving families out of the goodness of his heart, right? He’s buying them cheap off unscrupulous lodging-house masters who don’t want trouble. A man might be divided into eights before the family realizes he is missing, and they’ll spend years hoping for him to come back.”

“I always sketch their portraits,” Harry protests feebly.

“Of course you do, and how many came asking for them? Did anybody come, once, in your three years here?” Mr. Collins presses the issue no further, knowing the answer, and seems to run out of steam. His shoulders sag in defeat. “I should bring today’s subject up to the dissecting-room. Are you coming?”

They leave the latest claw-marked body setting for tomorrow’s dissection, and go to retrieve today’s supplies. After the long night in the basement, Harry is off duty as assistant-demonstrator, but stays, even if the smell makes him momentarily regret his earlier decision. The body is in much worse shape than their usual fare, having spent long weeks in the barely adequate mortuary at the Cowgate watch-house while Dr. Peddie harangued and harassed the Procurator Fiscal, the Inspector of Anatomy, and anybody who would listen or couldn’t escape fast enough, down to the lowliest constable, that the body should be performed on in circumvention of the laws. “In view of its scientific importance,” he said. “It is a rare occurrence indeed for our students to get exposure to subjects of a different race.” Someone, finally, must have relented, but not before the Oriental man found battered to death on the street was decomposed enough for his features to be barely discernible.

“The poor wretch,” Harry says, taking another look at the deep indentation at the side of the man’s skull where a boulder, or something similar enough, must have hit. “To think that he came halfway across the world, only to end up here, like this.”

Dr. Peddie will be performing the dissection himself, commenting on the anatomical differences between the races. Harry hopes that even the most negligent students might be instilled the sense that the differences, as is his belief, are skin-deep and disappear altogether once you hack into the chest cavity, unless the throng finds the view of the badly decomposed body too off-putting to follow the lecture. 

While Mr. Collins prepares Macintosh sleeves for the stragglers who have inevitably forgot theirs, Harry pauses to admire the dissecting-room. Shafts of light falling from the skylights and high, leaded windows, shining golden on the fresh sawdust not yet tainted with specks of blood and flesh, always make him think of theatre: the drama of human life unfolding right under his very eyes, the high pathos of creaturely life supporting the noblest functions of human psyche. He pauses in the shaft of light, stretches, and closes his eyes, imagining the red hair he only saw in candlelight shine in the light of day, and thinking of the miracle of human bodies coming together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (The story about students sketching pictures of a pretty murdered girl in a glass jar is true, and happened at the school historical!Harry Goodsir went to, if before his time. As one account of the Burke&Hare case has it, “Necrophilia, it seems, superseded medical science for a time on Dr Knox’s premises.”)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1) The song about Burke and Hare is authentic, except it was "Knox the boy who buys the beef" rather than Stanley.
> 
> 2) My understanding of the anatomy side of the final scene here is limited to skimming through a 19th-century surgery textbook. I have no idea how any of this actually looks and works, and I apologize to all readers who might know more on the subject for all the possible gaffes.

Ironic, really, that these rickety buildings, leaning heavily on one another like drunks shambling towards the tail end of the night, should be called “lands.” Such a lofty name, bearing in it the promise of empty spaces and winds that might pick you up and carry you to some other fate, surely a better one than this one right here, and at such odds with the reality of the place. There’s not a scrap of sky beyond the window without someone’s washing flapping right across it. Hickey scrutinizes the rooftops slanting dangerously towards the wynd’s centre, feigning ignorance of the urchin who’s been eyeing him for the last half-hour or more. 

The runt breathes in deeply, or as deeply as the lungs bred in this place, with no air to breathe unless it’s been inhaled and exhaled and farted into by the seething mass of humanity, might allow, and sings in a surprisingly melodious voice,

“Up the close and doon the stair,  
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.  
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,  
Stanley the boy who buys the beef.”

“Shoo,” he says with affected indignation, and adds, knowing that nothing lures a young boy in better than a promise of danger, “A small one like you will only earn me a pound. But then, you never know when a pound might come in handy.”

When he sees a needlewoman hurry past, he scowls at her from the top of his cart and screeches in his best fishmonger voice, “Fish- salted, pickled, smoked, fresh fish!”

When she passes, he curses under his breath, fearing that she might have scared off the boy, but the snivelly runt is still there when he looks down, his dark beady eyes glistening with enthusiasm.

“I want to be a sack-’em-up man when I grow up meself, just like yer,” the boy proclaims proudly.

“Aye? And what does yer ma say to it?”

“Ma’s dead,” the boy shrugs with the indifference of the young, blessed with short memory. “Me auntie’d cuff me though.”

“And where’s yer auntie, by the by? Getting late for a wee one like you to be out and about on your lonesome.”

“The family’s talking,” the boy throws up his hands—Hickey recognizes the gesture, decidedly strange on a kid so young, from a sedan-chair porter who must watch the runt on occasion then—and heaves a deep sigh. “I listened at the door, so they kicked me out.”

Something’s brewing, he thinks, and not only the snowstorm in the pregnant clouds dragging their heavy bellies across chippy chimneys. He sticks out his tongue to catch a few early snowflakes.

When he looks down again, an involuntary shiver runs through his body. The woman is there, her steps swift and silent as a ghost’s, her drab mantle making her blend in with the stormy dark. She grabs the boy by the forearm and drags him off forcibly, gesturing towards their land and hissing something in their singsong tongue. The boy gives him one last wave and disappears behind the door, which earns him an angry stare from the woman. He doesn’t blame her: he’d be suspicious of a stranger striking up a conversation with a kid in these quarters, too. An auntie, then: he’s mostly given up on trying to sketch out the connections within that huddling group ill-fitted to its surroundings, especially given that the boy, as far as he can tell, is the only one to have decent English. He’d swear the woman was related to the dead man though. Something similar in the way their faces were sculpted: a daughter, perhaps, or a niece.

He knocks on the window of a cobbler of his acquaintance and mimes watching his cart, which gives the woman time to slip away. That doesn’t matter, for he has committed the first steps of her route to memory by now. A turn into what looks like an opening of another close, but is in reality no more than a blind nook where drunks often go to relieve themselves, three steps down to a basement, past a door propped up inadequately with a broken brick, and into the dank darkness beyond.

The first few rooms are almost never empty, especially in this dog’s weather: gaberlunzies, bums, grubbers, Irish labourers down on their luck, toshers and all sorts of upstanding citizenry of the Auld Reekie flock there for cover. After the first few hallways though the space empties out, with only the most determined, or the ones with the most to hide, daring to venture farther.

If these are the city’s guts, they are the tapeworms, as sure as he breathes: burrowing into the foul dark passages, feasting and growing fat on that which most would find despicable. Something squelches under his shoes, something cracks: small bones dried with age, a rat, he hopes, but doesn’t look down, winding ever deeper through cramped corridors until the walls give way and open up on what was once a street, and not the smallest one at that.

Here, he pauses to listen. There are several routes he saw the woman take from this point, and there’s no knowing which one she favoured today. He briefly considers lighting the small cart-lamp he brought with him, weighing the practicalities against the risk of drawing unwelcome attention, but right as he reaches into his coat for a matchbox, her hoarse broken singing starts up.

There’s no such thing as being too cautious at this stage. He walks slowly, dragging his fingers along the wall of the passage lest he trips and betrays his presence with an ill-timed stomp or yelp. He shouldn’t be here, he understands full well; and yet, he has to know, even a lifetime of paying for it through his nose apparently not enough to wean him of his meddlesome curiosity.

Her singing grows more frantic as he approaches, plaintive notes of a supplication interwoven with something angrier, more commanding. Mustering his courage, Hickey dares a peek around the corner. The woman is kneeling next to a small oil lamp she lit on the floor, rocking on her haunches, deep in an incantation or prayer. Her teeth bared, she keens, and hums, and intones the words that sound less human with each discordant note. If it is indeed a prayer, this is no creed he wants to be a part of.

He doesn’t notice when the quality of air changes, not at first, and by the time he does, the time to turn on his heels and run is already past. There’s suddenly a smell of snow filling the passage, old snow, trodden and weary, bled on and spat on and walked over until it has become a document of the place’s lives and deaths, a record as fleeting and insalubrious as the fates it describes. Slowly, Hickey lifts his gaze from the woman kneeling on the floor towards the shape looming in the gloom on the other end of the passage.

He’d only seen a bear once in his life, in a traveling circus, but that one was blind, and old, and unsteady on its feet; this spectral presence is to that wretch as a man is to a stuffed monkey. Hickey’s seen it in action, lashing out, faster almost than the eye can follow, at the thugs that killed its former master, sucking their lives or souls out of the bodies writhing in horror. And yet, the weight of its present patient waiting is more eerie by half. It is still, incurious, as if it had all the time in the world.

Without interrupting the song, the woman bows to it, and Hickey’s hands ball into fists against his will. She _is_ commanding it then, the bitch, sending it on a rampage through the helpless destitute streets. Not for gain even, nor for any practical purpose he can discern. The drunken carousing of violence has no rhyme or reason to it, as far as he can tell, other than the vicious joy in power over lives crushed and cut short.

And then, something inexplicable happens. The woman straightens, takes a deep breath. Even the flickering light of the oil lamp seems to go still, and in that silent moment, she sticks out her tongue, and the light glints off something metallic and sharp in her hand.

The sawing motion seems to last impossibly long, made more horrifying by her silence. She has to pause for a second, once, blood coursing down her chin and shawl. The creature growls impatiently, sniffing. Her hand slips on the blade wet with blood.

On reflection, it was probably no more than a handful of seconds. No human being, no matter how determined, could have taken it for much longer, he thinks, even if it seemed like ages at the time. He breathes out a shaky sigh when she lifts up an open palm with her offering to the bear, and that’s when the creature shakes its snake-like head and takes a measuring look at him.

Hickey’s blood runs cold. This is where he’ll meet his end then: not in a brawl, not in a dark alleyway with his breeches pulled down, not with a pillow pressed over his face, certainly not in the decrepitude of old age, which was surely too much to hope for to begin with. At least he won’t meet it on his knees. He makes an almost superhuman effort to lift his chin in a gesture of defiance.

The creature huffs, pauses for one violence-laden moment, and then saunters off into the dark, leaving Hickey with his knees shaking, drunk on relief and something he has no words for. The low light is too dim to know for sure, but it seemed to him in that moment that the creature _saw_ him, really saw him for who he was: not a rat, not a two-bit swindler, not someone you’d cross the street on seeing, but a man with potential. The unfamiliar feeling of being recognized sticks in his throat like a lump.

That leaves Hickey with the embarrassing matter of the bleeding woman on the floor though. If the creature cut a swathe of carnage through the town with one dead master, Hickey’s bound to grow rich, fat and complacent selling the bodies it’ll leave in its wake after losing two; if he himself survives, that is. He waits a couple of moments to make sure that the creature is not coming back, and than dashes towards the woman.

Her eyes are already growing unfocused and distant with pain, yet she still takes a weak swing at him, trying to pummel his chest with her feeble fists. That’s gratitude for you, he thinks, giving her a decisive slap that sends blood drops flying through the air. He grabs her by the shoulders and half-drags, half-carries her up, towards the street level. 

Thank God, the locals have the common sense to mind their own business. Nobody stops him to ask what he’s doing with a woman bleeding like a stuck pig. Everybody looks the other way, deep in drunk torpor or just plain indifference ground into their bones, as they rush for the door, leaving a trail of blood spatters on the floor.

While they were underground, the snow has started up in earnest. The sky is crumbling down in large wet clumps. He sweeps a handful of snow from the top of his cart and stuffs the woman’s mouth full of the cold substance, his sleeves drenched through with blood by the time he reaches to scoop up more. After hesitating for a split second, he bundles the woman onto the cart.

No more than several hundred yards separate the squalid wynds and nooks of Cowgate from the Surgeons’ Square, and yet the difference could not be more pronounced if they were in two separate countries squished together as a result of some catastrophic event. There’s no crossing over unless it’s a matter of dire importance, and just this once, it’s a matter of life rather than death.

He curses himself under his breath for never even considering whether Goodsir’s the one on the graveyard shift until he knocks apprehensively on the door, the front of his coat doused liberally with blood. He’d be in a world of trouble if the wrong person opened the door, getting blood of his coat the least of them. It’s too late to bolt though when the door creaks open, and the shy smile stretching Goodsir’s lips makes his throat tighten. Then the student’s gaze drops, and his face goes stony at the sight of blood.

“Just the man I need,” he rasps, and drags Goodsir bodily to the cart, not altogether past gloating about the bloody fingerprints he’s leaving on the man’s fancy coat.

“She’s alive,” Goodsir whispers when he lifts a dirty horse blanket from the bottom of the cart.

“I sure hope so. Will you help her?”

He doesn’t have time to finish before Goodsir yanks down the cart’s side, and carefully lifts the woman up with a strength Hickey never suspected the slip of a man could possess. Hickey holds the basement door open for him as the man walks inside, bending slightly backwards under the weight.

“She did it herself,” he explains before the student gets any ideas.

“Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?” Goodsir asks after depositing her on the table usually reserved for dead bodies, prying her mouth open and peering in.

Hickey sputters. “People _die_ in those hospitals. That’s what you go there for, to croak if nobody wants you around as you do so.”

“She will die here!” There’s a note of hysteria in Goodsir’s voice. “What do you think we are? We don’t have laudanum, we don’t have anything caustic to cauterize the wound, we... Wait here.”

With a weak wave of the hand, he dashes up a mystifying flight of stairs that Hickey’s never been invited to. Hickey shrugs and goes out to make sure that at least his pony is warm and covered against the boisterous weather.

By the time he returns, Goodsir’s back too, a scattering of implements that look like instruments of torture spread on the table next to the woman.

“Good. Hold her head,” he barks with little respect for the sacrifices Hickey’s already made in bringing her here to begin with.

Despite quietly hoping that offloading her into Goodsir’s waiting hands would mark the end of this dismal night for him, Hickey moves to stands behind her, in the place the student indicated.

“Tilt her chin up,” Goodsir commands, reaching into her mouth with what looks like scissors bent into the shape of a bird’s beak, and pokes at the open wound. “Higher.”

“Do you plan to cut it even shorter?” Hickey asks, swallowing against the creeping nausea.

“I have to tie off the artery.”

After some clicking and poking at awkward angles, he finally draws out the end of what looks like a glistening string. The woman, largely unresponsive before that, jerks spasmodically under his hands.

“Hold her! Hell and botheration, that’s the hypoglossal nerve. The blasted artery’s always deeper than you expect.”

“Me, I expect to never come into contact with them to begi-”

Hickey’s cut short as a splatter of blood falls across his cheek.

“That’s more like it! That’s the raninal vessel. Hold it.” Goodsir points at the scissors now holding the end of a vessel spewing blood.

“I cannot hold both her chin and this thing!” Hickey yelps, but manages, pressing her head awkwardly against his midriff with one hand.

“Good thing I’m not asking if you can,” Goodsir nods, fishing out a string from his assortment of supplies, and quickly tying the vessel off.

There’s a gurgle that almost makes Hickey retch, and the woman starts coughing, dislodging yet more blood. 

“She’s choking,” Goodsir yelps, hastily rolling her over onto her side and letting the blood pool on the table. When a rivulet finds its way to the table’s edge and trickles to the floor, Hickey cautiously moves to the side to make sure that his shoes, at least, survive the ordeal.

When Goodsir eventually decides that the immediate danger’s past, he rolls the insensate woman onto her back again and looks into her mouth even more closely than before. “The sublingual branch seems intact, thank God for small blessings.” 

Hickey watches intently as Goodsir picks up a hooked needle and starts stitching up, as best he can, the wound where her tongue used to be.

“I’m still a semester away from being let loose in a hospital,” he says with a weak laugh when he finishes the handiwork to his satisfaction.

“The hospital where people go to die,” Hickey says, shaking blood clots off his hands.

“Yes, right,” Goodsir sighs, his shoulders sagging, which almost makes Hickey regret saying that. “You have blood on your face.”

The student wipes his hands on his apron, licks his finger, and rubs at his cheek in a familiar, familial gesture belying the horror of this place. The gesture gives Hickey an altogether unwanted glimpse of some other time, of some other, unimaginable, less horrifying place where they could be somebody else. But then, had they been anybody else, their paths would never have crossed to begin with.

Hickey winces. He’s been balls-deep inside this man. He’s had this man fuck his throat raw. And yet, this crushing, horrifying intimacy catches him by surprise, leaves him heaving and breathless, a fish thrashing on land, a hook in its lip. He leans back to avoid the touch.

Goodsir folds almost in half to bring his ear closer to the woman’s lips, listening for her breathing: quiet and weak, yes, but undeniably there. When he straightens up again, there’s a giddy smile on his face. 

“You saved her life.”

Hickey grimaces. “I wasted my coat, is what I did.”

Goodsir doubles up again, this time with laughter. “Yes, your best camlet coat,” he rasps through hysteria. “Quite beyond repair.”

“You didn’t do too bad yourself,” Hickey finally says, steeling all his courage to reach out and pat Goodsir on the shoulder, as cautiously as he would touch a thing with claws and sharp fangs.

“I’d better make us some tea then,” Goodsir says. “For her, too, when she comes to. Tea with milk and sugar is just the thing she needs after losing so much blood.”

Despite that pronouncement, he stays in place, leaning closer to Hickey, not touching, not even trying to touch, just breathing in the air he breathes out, smelling for his skin under the pervasive stench of blood.

And it’s at that moment that the heavy door on top of the stairs flies open. On instinct, Hickey steps aside from Goodsir and half-turns towards the woman on the table, pretending to be busy. 

He recognizes the man at the top of the stairs as one Mr. Collins, the local porter. The man takes one look at their blood-spattered clothes, and wheezes, “Oh sweet God in heaven, Mr. Goodsir, what have you done?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) Sorry for the long delay in updating: busy work schedule happened :( I feel like I fell out of habit of wording (and forgot half of the English I had), so I'm not that happy with this chapter, but any written chapter is still miles better than an unwritten chapter, or so I keep telling myself.
> 
> (2) A reminder, because that happened several chapters and more than a month in real time ago: Harry calls Hickey Billy because that's how the lying rat introduced himself.

He’d rather walk through fire than endure this conversation for another moment, Harry realizes. The thought is made all the more distressing by the fact that, he’s ashamed to admit, he liked to imagine this encounter. He was often comforted by a thought of some vague future in which he’d be able to sit by the fire with his brothers, or with Mr. Collins, but with Hickey—Billy—also unexplainably there, his quicksilver temperament a pertinent counterpoint to Mr. Collins’ sanguine nature; his hunger for knowledge, rivaling that of many of Harry’s fellow students, being sated in conversations with Harry’s brothers. That future, or a part of it at least, is fading into obsolescence right under his very eyes.

“Well, _he_ says he didn’t do it, but it’s not like _she_ can tell otherwise, now can she?” Mr. Collins says petulantly, beginning the third iteration of the argument that grew stale a round ago.

Billy, lounging against the damp wall with exaggerated insouciance, doesn’t hesitate to take the bait.

“Your power of observation is impeccable, which is more than I can say about your intelligence. Why would I inconvenience myself dragging her here if I wanted her dead, you smartarse?”

“You could have changed your mind. These things happen.”

Mr. Collins crosses his hands over his chest; Billy bristles. Harry finds it hard to see his daytime and nighttime life intersect like this, the man who knows his body and the man who knows his mind locked in a clash. It was unpardonably naïve of him to assume that he would never be forced to choose between the two. Harry lets out a sigh, then breathes in deeply to calm his racing thoughts, and coughs.

“Mr. Collins, did you make a fire before coming down?” he asks, cutting through their spat.

“I didn’t. When I saw you didn’t come up, I went to check if everything was in order down here-”

“We shall make her a warm drink,” Harry says decisively, nodding at the woman: still unconscious, which begins to trouble him, but still breathing, which, frankly, is more than he could hope for. “On that note, could you please not yell, the both of you? She needs rest. I really wish you wouldn’t disturb her.”

“Am I right to assume that you are taking his side?” After the many hours they’ve spent in companionable silence or chatter, Mr. Collins wields unpractised formality like a blunt weapon.

Harry rubs at the bridge of his nose. “I do believe Mr. Hickey, yes, but that’s not about taking a side. As far as taking sides goes, I’m on hers.” The words take him by surprise, rising quiet independently of his will out of some far recess of his mind, but they are not untrue. Unlike many of his fellow students, he never relished the prospect of being tasked with the care of patients. His passion for the inner workings of a human body has always been more detached and academic; the pedestrian practicalities of medical treatment held little interest for him, until now. But then, he didn’t expect the protective attachment borne of seeing a vulnerable body pull through danger, due in part to his own meagre efforts. Experimentally, he adds, “She rather needs someone on her side, I believe. That’s my duty as a doctor and as a man.”

“May I remind you that the closest you’ve come to qualifying as a doctor is mangling dead bodies, which cannot become any more dead, no matter what butchery you’ve made of the job?” This, coming from Billy, hurts more than he’d be willing to admit, but it reminds Harry of the fact that’s been nagging at the back of his mind ever since Billy dragged the woman in.

Hopefully, bringing it up will serve the double purpose of both distracting Mr. Collins from his enmity towards Billy, and unloading his own mind.

“Speaking of dissections, the oriental man we dissected last week was missing his tongue too. Dr. Peddie said it might have been posthumous-” Seeing the look of incomprehension in Billy’s eyes, Harry explains, “The body lay in the mortuary for so long that we thought the rats might have got to it and taken a morsel. Now I’m having my doubts.”

To his surprise, Billy lights up. “A short, stout man, dead about a month? With a thinning short beard?”

Stunned, Harry can do nothing but nod.

“That’s her father, I think. Uh-huh, they are not oriental. They are Esquis, the Esquimaux.” When neither Harry nor Mr. Collins react, he explains, “There was a lecture tour a couple years ago? Wild Esquimaux, real denizens of the wilderness, a party consisting of a shaman, a warrior, two women, and a child in curious and picturesque costumes, that sort of muck?”

This, finally, rings a bell. “I went,” Harry says. The lecture was excellent, and provided food for conversation with his brothers for several weeks to come.

“Well, I didn’t,” Billy scowls. “If I wanted to see curious and picturesque costumes, I’d go to High Street, without having to pay a penny for the privilege, unless a pickpocket relieved me of my purse.”

It is hard to reconcile this frail form in a worn striped flannel petticoat with proud figures in their native garb he saw on the stage. “Are you sure it’s them?”

“Aye, that’s them alright.”

“What would bring them back here?” Mr. Collins cut in. “This is hardly the Antarctic wilderness.”

“They are from the Arctic,” Harry corrects absent-mindedly, as Billy snipes,

“They never left, did they? There was a spot of trouble with the company that brought them here, and so they stayed. Nobody besieges the streets surrounding their lodgings anymore, now that they are in Cowgate and not in a fancy lecture hall.”

This, somehow, makes Harry’s heart sink even more than the physical brutality of a missing tongue. The thought of the people who grew up with endless open landscapes being confined to cramped nooks where an eye barely has space to roam without encountering a slimy wall or another sight of squalor is almost too much to bear. “They were just marooned in Cowgate, of all places?”

“You make that sound like such a horrible fate,” Billy scoffs. “Many of us live there, and count ourselves lucky, if you need to know.”

That might be true, but that’s not the whole truth either, as is often the case with how Billy sees the world, Harry thinks, before correcting himself: as is the case with all of us. He amends, “That hardly compares. At least you speak the language. You were also born here.”

“No I wasn’t.”

Harry sets the fact aside for safekeeping, a new addition to the measly trove of things he knows about Billy.

Ever the rationalist, Mr. Collins cuts in, “Excellent, we’ll take her back to her family when she comes to.” 

“She needs to recuperate in a more salubrious environment.”

“And where would that be? You don’t intend to take her to Lothian Street and have her join your little menagerie of brothers and other animals, do you?” Before hearing the scepticism in Mr. Collins’ voice, Harry did indeed contemplate the notion, and he doesn’t like the vindictive tone one bit when the porter presses on, “The students will have the time of day with the gossip.”

“Do you weigh human life against gossip?”

“Loath as I am to agree with him, you cannot just keep her,” Billy chimes in. “She has a home, even if it’s not up to your standards.”

Harry has despaired of Billy and Mr. Collins ever seeing eye to eye on anything, yet when they do, it somehow brings very little relief.

“I’m sure there are dictionaries, something to make sure that their living conditions are as comfortable as possible under the circumstances,” he muses.

“Their boy speaks good English,” Billy persists. “Incidentally, do any of you smell smoke?”

Now that Billy mentions it, the smell of smoke is unmistakable.

“I didn’t make the fire, like I’ve said. It must be coming from the street,” Mr. Collins says, noisily breathing in.

“Well, we might do well to go up and make that tea,” Harry says with a tired sigh, the exertions of the sleepless night finally catching up with him. He can only hope that the two men don’t kill one another before he gets back down here. Checking on the woman one last time, he moves towards the stairs.

Harry cringes when he realizes that the smell gets heavier as he goes up the stairs, and when he touches the bronze handle of the heavy oak door, it’s hot to the touch. This does not bode well, he thinks. This does not bode well at all.

Against his better judgment, he still pulls the door open. When he thought he’d rather walk through fire than endure the confrontation for a moment longer, he did not quite mean it that literally. He steps back from the blazes raging in front of him, and almost falls down the stairs. A cough rises in his throat as much from the smell as from the horrible sight of flames licking along the dark wooden panelling of the ground floor corridor, crackling merrily on the carpet. He pushes the door closed again.

“But I didn’t-” Mr. Collins protests feebly as Billy rushes to the basement door and pushes at it with his shoulder; it doesn’t budge.

“Unbolt it,” Harry squeezes out between the coughs, tumbling clumsily down the stairs.

“D’you think I didn’t?” Billy yelps, rushing towards the table. He hesitates a moment over the assortment of instruments, still covered in drying blood, and finally chooses the one he finds most promising.

After several moments of swearing and prodding at the lock, he rasps, “The lock is jammed.”

“Who’d want-”

“Irrelevant,” Billy growls, pulling his scarf up around his face. “The more relevant question is, is it just wood between the basement and the ground floor?”

Mr. Collins looks up at the wooden beams above. “I’d imagine so.”

“How much time do we have, d’you reckon, before the whole thing goes down?”

Pushing Billy to the side, Mr. Collins rushes at the door and knocks against it with his shoulder, than gives it a heavy kick, earning them nothing but a pained grunt.

“Let him work,” Harry says, carefully putting a hand on Mr. Collins’s shoulder.

Billy drops to his knees in front of the door again and resumes his attempts to pick the lock. The air in the room is visibly denser with smoke by the time he stands up and says,

“There’s no point. Any other exits, by any chance?”

“This is a basement, not a ballroom, you dimwit, how many exits d’you think it needs?” Mr. Collins barks.

“Well, more than it has, obviously,” Billy says, glancing up. There are now whiffs of smoke snaking their way between the wooden planks of the ceiling.

All the efforts to save the woman, all the frantic fumbling with catgut and a crow’s beak, was for naught then, Harry thinks incongruously. They will all die here, right next to the small room in which dead bodies are stored for upcoming dissections; they themselves will be too mangled and charred to provide useful dissection material though. And right as that thought runs its course, a memory swims up to the forefront of his mind.

“There’s that door,” he says, before a hacking cough bends him over. It’s not until a good half a minute later that he finally stands up straight again. “Right after the dead room. It leads somewhere past our building’s perimeter. I always wondered whether it connected to the next school.”

“Time to find out, then,” Billy perks up, and turns to Mr. Collins. “Do you have the key?”

When the porter shakes his head, Billy lets out a laugh. “You are lucky I’m here then.”

Harry dashes for the wooden stretcher propped up against the wall, the unwieldy one they use for carrying bodies from this hall to the dead room, and drags it towards the table.

“Mr. Collins, will you help me carry her?”

“That’s unsanitary,” the man says, eying the darker stains on the wood.

“So’s dying, or so I’ve heard,” Billy says, already heading down the corridor and grabbing an oil-lamp off the wall as he goes.

“Why cannot _he_ help you carry her?” Mr. Collins grumbles, helping Harry heave the woman off the table.

“Because he’ll be picking the lock. And before you ask, I’m certain he acquired the skill as a boyish lark, and I don’t have it in me to argue the point.”

Fortunately, neither does Mr. Collins. When Harry casts once last glance at the stairs, smoke is visibly creeping under the door to the ground floor.

When they reach the door and deposit the stretcher on the floor, Billy is already working on the lock, his brows knit in concentration. They can do nothing but wait now, hoping that Billy’s nimble hands can help them outrun the inferno raging above. The moment of inaction leaves room for panic to sink back in, and for other feelings too. Fear for his life mingles with tenderness and fear for this diminutive man. Harry wishes he knew him earlier, wishes Billy didn’t have to have developed the quiet resolve under the worst circumstances that only comes when you’ve had the worst happen to you time and time again; but then, where would they be without Billy’s odd skills and resourcefulness?

Had they been alone, Harry would be thoroughly tempted to map the creases on Billy’s brow with his fingers, or to touch the crown of his head as an anchor against fear. He’s half-tempted to do it as is, consequences be damned, not that they are likely to have much time for consequences if the lock fails to open. Before Harry does anything stupid though, Billy gets up and bends to brush the dust off his knees.

“Well?” Mr. Collins asks, and coughs.

“I cannot open it,” Billy says, straightening to look him in the eye.

There’s a cracking sound from behind them. The beams must have begun to give way. This is where it ends then.

“Are you sure you did everything you could?” Harry asks, reaching to take his hand, but Billy spreads his arms in a theatrical gesture.

“Just joking,” he says, and pushes at the door. It swings open. The lamp’s flames swing towards the darkness in the open maw of the passage beyond.

Billy is the first to step forward, lighting the way for Harry and Mr. Collins, who try to manoeuvre the stretcher into the narrow passage without jostling it too much. Almost immediately, they are confronted with a new challenge of a steep flight of stairs leading down.

“Is it a wine cellar?” Harry muses as his hands sweat and slip on the stretcher’s handles.

They pause to rest at the bottom of the stairs, and the smell of smoke trails after them.

“No, it’s far too large,” Mr. Collins says, following Billy, who walks a dozen steps down the passage in either direction, with his gaze. 

His curiosity largely extinguished by exhaustion and panic, which has not yet drained fully, Harry bends down to check on his charge, and is startled to see her eyes open.

“How are you feeling?” he asks, before realizing how silly the question is, even were she capable of answering it. “I’m Harry,” he says instead, and repeats, pressing a palm to his chest, “Harry. We are here to help.”

“Can she walk?” Mr. Collins asks, earning himself Harry’s reproachful glare.

“That would be convenient. These passages can get narrow,” Billy adds from further down the corridor. The stretcher is, indeed, inconvenient at the best of times, and carrying it through narrow, dark, uneven, winding corridors might prove impracticable, Harry has to admit.

“What is it, in any case?” Mr. Collins asks while Harry tries to help the woman up, slinging her arm across his shoulders. “Is it that passage that connects Holyrood to the Castle?”

Harry doesn’t pay him more than half a mind, taking an experimental step with the woman heavily leaning on him.

“Nah, we are a way off from that one,” Billy says, and there’s a hint of a smile in his voice.

“What, it exists?” Harry’s curiosity, apparently, has been dampened by the morning’s challenges and dangers, but not extinguished altogether.

“Not as such,” Billy grins. “But there’s all sorts of other things. Old connected basements. Old streets entombed and built over as the town developed. I bet you could get close enough to Holyrood without surfacing once, given enough time to look for a passage.”

“I’ve heard there were poisonous gases underground,” Mr. Collins gives a shudder. “Have you heard that story about a bagpiper who-“

“That’s just blarney to make sure that good boys like you don’t stray where they shouldn’t,” Billy interrupts with a self-satisfied smirk, uncertain light of the lamp turning his face into an eerie mask. “This way.”

Harry decides that they’d make a dash back for the stretcher if the exertion proves too much for the woman, but she walks on, largely out of sheer stubbornness, he suspects. Her weight where she leans on him is barely enough to make him bend down. She’s thin in a way that suggests malnourishment rather than a slight build. Their shamble forward is slow enough that, despite the worries for his unexpectedly acquired patient, Harry has the time to notice the lichens growing on the walls. He cannot help but wonder if they are identical to the ones growing on the surface, or a different species altogether, used to growing in the dank darkness. He makes a mental note to come back and explore what other flora and fauna the place might harbour, once they get out.

While he himself relaxes with each step they take, Billy seems to grow more tense.

“Where are we going then?” Mr. Collins asks, catching up with Billy and letting Harry and the woman lag several steps behind.

“To the nearest passage that looks like it leads to the surface,” Billy says, visibly nervous. Harry wonders when he grew so used to reading his reactions from minute changes in his posture, but decides not to prod any further.

“You said the dangers were an old wives’ tale,” Mr. Collins grumbles.

“I said poisonous gases were an old wives’ tale, not that there were no dangers here at all,” Billy says, and then snaps at Harry over his shoulder. “Can’t you walk faster?”

“I could, but you don’t expect her to-”

And that is when the sleepless night, the smoke they’ve inhaled in the school’s basement, and the possible noxious gases get the better of him. Harry looks up to meet Billy’s gaze, but his eyes slide past the man’s frame, to the looming figure in the half-darkness ahead. Before his mind has the time to process what he sees, the tunnel seems to fill with a rancid animal smell: dirty fur, something older and more predatory than anything he’d ever experienced, and the all too familiar stench of old blood. The creature rears up on its hind legs, its head almost touching the roof of the tunnel, and roars. Even knowing full well that it is nothing but the product of his addled mind and not caring what his companions might think of him, Harry screams.

“Oh bugger,” Billy yelps, turning in the direction of his gaze. Harry should be relieved to know that he is not hallucinating, but at the moment, that would be a much preferable outcome.

Before any of them have the time to react, Billy springs into action. He jumps back, grabs Mr. Collins by the shoulders and gives him a good shove, sending him right into the beast’s paws.

Harry wants to stop screaming, but finds he can’t. The sound forces his throat open, reverberates through his bones, echoes through every cell of his body. The claw marks, he thinks as the creature stamps a giant paw on Mr. Collins’s chest. The size of the paw is a perfect match for the gashes he saw on the odd bodies brought in for dissection.

And then the beast leans down its head and breathes in. Harry is not a superstitious man, and not at all given to odd beliefs, but in that horrible moment he’d swear up and down, and keep swearing blind till his dying day, which just might be today–out of the frying pan and into the fire they ran–that the creature sucked out Mr. Collins’s soul.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For various political reasons, lecture tours with Indigenous Americans were apparently a bit of a fad in the 1830s England, so that bit at least is historically accurate. (Bibliography on the matter includes _Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada_ by Cecilia Morgan.)


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